Wei Qimei

Studying under Sun Duoci in his teenage years, Wei Qimei enrolled at National Central University in 1942, graduated in 1947 and joined the Painting Department of Central Academy of Fine Arts as a faculty member in 1950. Like most of his contemporary artists from 1950s to 1970s, Wei adopted a realistic and figurative method in his practice, and created a series of thematic, storytelling oil paintings closely connected with political ideology.

In the upheavals of the Chinese society in the 1970s, arts and culture gradually came to face a less stressful situation, allowing the artists to explore and experiment on new genres and forms. Wei in his late fifties was inspired by the burgeoning art events and active young artists to have the ‘courage to participate in an art marathon’. At this stage, his work on modern urban life shies away from the heaviness of history in his earlier paintings, conjuring up the future with a lightness of touch that speaks about the promising and unfailing technology and knowledge.

Wei delivers a ‘forward-looking’ attitude in his work throughout his life – such pursuit of ‘new things’ corresponds with his sensibility towards novel topics as a caricaturist, as well as the urgent break from the old age when the entire art-world embraced the new era. Meanwhile, it was a result of the realistic tendency in arts and culture which celebrated new life and new times since the 1950s. Accordingly, Wei’s work displays a detached realism that bridges the historical and the new, a style concluded as ‘poetic realism’ by critics. The loosening culture in the late seventies enabled a diverse range of expression on formal beauty, while new languages were in need to depict the modern urban life. Notably inspired by Edward Hopper, Wei explored formality, order and the relationship between line and plane, and worked out a succinct way of distancing the image and the real life. Oscillating between the poetic detachment and the realistic narratives, Wei’s work demonstrates a literary efficacy that is almost story-telling and avoids figurative depiction. The distancing effect allows his work to move between the general, illusory social narrative and the intimate, tangible narrative in everyday life, which broadens the expression of realism.